DAML-ONT and OIL

This page attempts to provide information concerning OIL-
The Ontology
Inference Layer - from the perspective of a reader interested in DAML and
its evolution.
There is an active discussion going on the www-rdf-logic mailing list
concerning the evolution of the DAML ontology language and
its relations to OIL, thus it may be useful to read
some background information.

OIL is a language built on a long history of research
in description logics.
Description Logic is a subfield of knowledge representation
and as such aims to provide a vehicle for expressing structured information
and for reasoning with the information in a principled manner.
Description logics may be viewed as providing a formal foundation for
frame-based systems, object-oriented representations, semantic data models,
and type systems.
OIL is an effort to
produce a well defined language for integrating ontologies
with web standards (in particular RDF/RDFS and XML/XMLS).
It is a web-based representation and
inference layer for ontologies using the constructs found in many frame
languages and reasoning and formal semantics in description
logics.

There is a main
OIL site which contains a number of documents of interest.
Perhaps the most interesting documents are the:

syntax specification. This provides a BNF notation for the terms.
It is meant for readers interested in the full specification.
Authors:
Frank van Harmelen,
Ian Horrocks, and
Michel Klein

semantics specification:
html version,
pdf version.
This provides a formal specification and semantics for OIL. It is a
model-theoretic specification for the meaning of the OIL
constructs and specifies the inference implications of the statements.
This is meant for serious readers.
Author: Ian Horrocks.

There will be another document posted soon providing a mapping
between OIL and DAML-ONT.
Currently there are discussions concerning the differences between OIL
and DAML-ONT. See, for example, the
thread on the RDF-logic mailing list.

Acknowledgements

This collection pulls together an incomplete list of pointers to
many other people's work. It draws heavily on a long history (over 20 years)
of work in description logics. Most recently it leans on
work done by the authors of OIL:
Jeen Broekstra,
Stefan Decker,
Michael Erdmann,
Dieter Fensel,
Carole Goble,
Frank van Harmelen,
Ian Horrocks,
Michel Klein,
Deborah McGuinness,
Enrico Motta,
Peter Patel-Schneider,
Steffen Staab,
and
Rudi Studer.